Amazon Website Goes Down (Update: For 49 Minutes)

Amazon’s homepage is refusing to load for a large number of users this afternoon, according to multiple reports on Twitter.

In my own tests, sometimes the page would load, and other times I would simply get a “service unavailable” error.

Update: An Amazon spokesperson provided the following statement: “The gateway page of Amazon.com was offline to some customers for approximately 49 minutes. Other pages of the site were accessible and AWS was not impacted.” Sources close to the situation said the issues were internal and that the site was not hacked.

A homepage outage is truly very rare for the e-commerce giant.

A decade ago, when Amazon was less reliable, analysts would estimate how much the company was losing every second, or every minute. Now that the company’s sales total $61 billion a year, it must be even more significant.

Over the past year, there have been several instances where Amazon’s customers, such as Netflix and Instagram, have gone down due to Amazon server outages. This time, the problems seem to be restricted to Amazon’s own services, which either means the homepage operates on different servers, or it’s experiencing another problem entirely.

In case you desperately need to shop, get on your phone. The Verge is reporting that the outages are not affecting the company’s mobile applications.

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